Resistance is not romantic:
Understanding the complex and contested nature of girls resistance
Resistance is not romantic:
Understanding the complex and contested nature of girls resistance
In the face of all the violence and hardship that is so pervasive in girlhood, resistance brings some meaning, something to cling onto – even if fleeting – some small possibility that another way might just be possible.
And yet, as feminist anthropologist Leila Abu-Lughod argues, there is perhaps a tendency to romanticise resistance, to read all forms of resistance as signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated. By reading resistance in this way, we collapse together the distinctions between forms of resistance, and we foreclose certain questions about the workings of power, distinctions and questions which are critical to resistance work.
All of the systems and structures that transpire against girls in the wider world are also at play in our social justice struggles. While many girls find critical and defining support from their communities, many also reflect on the extreme isolation they experience and how movement spaces are non-existent, inaccessible or even harmful in their contexts. The painful and contradictory reality is that many share stories of exclusion, ridicule, harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, adultism/ageism and sexual violence in the very spaces meant to be working towards a world that is more just.
And all of this relational pain is only amplified and complexified further when it takes place in the context of repressive regimes and closing civil society space, where her strategies and tactics for resistance are blocked at every turn by the state. In many places, we see both girlhood and rights agendas collide with right wing ideologies in ways that serve to weaponise the very idea of girlhood.
Ultimately girls are tired, and they are hurting. Their friends and families and communities are hurting. They are carrying on their shoulders the extraordinary burden of surviving without even the most basic commodities of survival. To fully acknowledge the trauma and pain and exhaustion girls are holding as they resist is to bring us right back to where we started, to the existentially violent backdrop of her existence. Indeed when we fully see this, we understand her resistance as even more miraculous, even more sacred, but at the same time treated as so very profane.
- Explore: Complexity of Resistance
